Why Visibility Breaks Down as Engineering Teams Scale
You used to know everything.
Every pull request. Every commit. Every roadmap decision.
When the team was five people, you didn’t need a dashboard. You were the dashboard.
But then five became fifty.
Then a hundred.
Then ten teams under three directors under a VP.
And one day, you wake up and realize:
👉 I don’t know what’s happening anymore.
Not because you stopped caring.
Not because you stopped showing up.
Because somewhere along the way, visibility broke down.
And no one warned you it was coming.
Scaling doesn’t just add people. It adds distance.
I remember the first time I opened Jira and couldn’t make sense of it anymore.
It wasn’t that the work wasn’t happening.
It wasn’t that the metrics weren’t updating.
It was that I couldn’t connect what I was seeing… to what I cared about.
That’s what Gleb Braverman and I talked about on the podcast:
👉 Visibility doesn’t scale with headcount.
👉 Every layer adds friction.
👉 Every new team adds another dashboard, another tool, another context to lose.
Gleb described it like piloting a Concorde plane—you need five people in the cockpit just to keep the thing flying.
That’s what it feels like leading a growing engineering org.
You’re not running a team anymore.
You’re operating a system.
And that system doesn’t tell you what’s really going on.
Why the System Makes It So Hard to See the Whole Picture
It’s not that you stopped looking.
It’s that the system stopped making it possible.
👉 Every team has their own Jira board.
👉 Every project tracks different metrics.
👉 Every department reports in a different format.
👉 Every meeting covers only part of the puzzle.
You’re not missing visibility because you’re not paying attention.
You’re missing visibility because the system fragmented it across tools, teams, and time zones.
You don’t get a single pane of glass.
You get a mosaic of dashboards, updates, metrics—and none of them connect upstream to outcomes.
As Gleb put it: “It’s all technically visible. But it’s not practically visible.”
Everything exists somewhere.
But it’s scattered.
Siloed.
Trapped inside tools.
Stuck inside update meetings.
Hidden behind "that’s their domain."
And the cost isn’t just effort.
The cost is delay.
By the time you piece it all together… the moment to act has passed.
That’s why leaders feel overwhelmed.
That’s why everything keeps bouncing back to you.
That’s why decisions feel reactive, not proactive.
The system wasn’t designed to give you clarity.
It was designed to optimize local execution.
And that’s exactly why visibility breaks down at scale.
So how do you get visibility back?
You don’t get it back by staring harder at dashboards.
You get it back by creating structures that reconnect the dots.
Here’s what I’ve learned—and what we unpacked on the show:
✅ Stop trying to see everything. Start deciding what must be visible.
You can’t track it all. But you can define what signals actually matter.
✅ Replace status reports with shared story.
Instead of “what’s done,” ask: “what problem are we solving, and what’s changing?”
Make teams narrate outcomes, not just outputs.
✅ Build a feedback loop from outcomes back to engineers.
Engineers need to see the impact of their code—not just merge tickets.
✅ Ritualize vision, not just metrics.
Add “vision moments” into planning: ask, “what’s the why here?” in every roadmap review.
✅ Map the org’s complexity—before it buries you.
Every added team, role, process increases the fog. Make it someone’s job to map the terrain.
This is normal. You’re scaling.
If you’ve ever stared at a roadmap and thought:
“How did we get here?”
If you’ve ever pieced together Jira boards like a detective, trying to understand why the team feels stuck…
If you’ve ever quietly wondered why leading a bigger team feels like flying blind…
You’re not crazy.
You’re not failing.
You’re experiencing what every scaling leader experiences when visibility breaks down.
And here’s the part no one tells you:
You don’t get visibility back by looking harder.
You get it back by building clarity into the system itself.
That’s the shift.
That’s the work.
And it starts by admitting:
✅ Every layer adds distance.
✅ Every tool hides as much as it shows.
✅ Every metric’s a proxy—but not always the right one.
The goal isn’t to see everything.
The goal is to make sure the right things stay visible.
🎧 We dug deep into this on the latest episode of Product Driven, with Gleb Braverman from HackerPulse.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re steering a plane you can’t see the cockpit of anymore…
👉 Go listen to the full conversation here
We broke down why this happens—and what leaders can do about it, tomorrow.